How a Custom Behavioral Assessment Framework Created a £24M Savings for a Leading British Bank

Situation

Arriving at the right assessment solution for a complex, multi-billion-pound contemporary business is a major challenge. But, this was a challenge that PeopleScout’s team of psychologists was built for when our banking client came to us with a big brief. The banking group had just launched a crucial new set of values. They wanted us to create a custom behavioral assessment framework, along side a full suite of candidate assessment tools to support hiring into core customer-facing roles across the bank.

Solution

Insight

We began by carrying out a comprehensive job analysis, involving focus groups with over 300 colleagues as well as one-on-one interviews with job incumbents, senior stakeholders and transformation stakeholders. We identified synergies and differences between role requirements and complexity across the financial services organization. The detailed research and analysis revealed three job families across all roles, each with four levels of complexity. We developed definitions and behavioral indicators for each group and each level in the framework.

Design

Following sign-off on the new behavioral framework, we developed the assessment matrix and recommended key assessment methods. We streamlined and simplified the existing multi-stage process, bringing both the process and tools into alignment with the new values. This made it easy to understand and implement across the bank. We recommended a three-stage process across the framework, allowing for tailoring to job family and complexity levels, using specific skills assessments and assessment center micro-exercises.

We recommended a two-stage application, with a short form at the beginning to reduce early candidate drop out.
We followed this with a more comprehensive data collection form, completed after candidates were more engaged with the job opportunity.

Pre-Screening: Situational Judgement Test

The pre-screening stage comprised an online scenario-based behavioral assessment or Situational Judgement Test (SJT). SJTs are strong predictors of future job success, and it gave the bank an opportunity to provide deep insight into the brand culture and their values. It also created a positive candidate experience, while increasing diversity and reducing both time-to-hire and recruiter effort.

Mid-Screening: Motivational Fit

The mid-screening stage took place through video or telephone interviews, dependent on the role. The interview provided the client with deep insight into motivational fit and communication skills and enabled them to evaluate numerous critical behaviors for the roles. Plus, it ensure only the best applicants reached the most time-intensive, face-to-face final stage.

Final Screening: Assessment Center

This final screening stage was an assessment center for the more complex roles, incorporating interviews, role-plays and group exercises. We introduced a series of inclusive and realistic micro-exercises, assessing the candidate’s values, potential and mindset as they correlated to the job family and level. For example, to assess for a growth mindset, we created a micro-exercise in which the candidate was provided with feedback on their previous performance and given the opportunity to reflect and learn from it. They were then asked to demonstrate how they would incorporate that feedback.

We significantly upgraded the bank’s assessment center capability by increasing the use of behavioral exercises for primary evidence gathering, combining scores across assessment tools to triangulate data and providing robust final evaluations.

Informed Choices

Candidates shared appreciation for the chance to demonstrate the breadth of their skills and that they felt fairly assessed. They also gained sufficient insight to make informed decisions about whether the organization was offering the environment they were seeking, and whether its values and purpose were aligned with their own.

Our solution showcased the bank’s brand and culture, and the built-in job preview features ensured candidates were given sufficient knowledge at the automated pre-screening stage to make an informed self-assessment of their own match to the organization. This meant that poor-fit candidates withdrew before resources were unnecessarily committed in the higher-touch, mid-screening stage of the process. It also supported the client in creating a respectful, two-way selection process, which is expected by modern job seekers.

Results

We built-in various ways of measuring the cost-efficiencies and overall return-on-investment of the end-to-end assessment solution. The client was delighted with the results:

• A reduction in the classroom-based training time required as the caliber of candidates was improved.
• Improved conversion at every stage of the assessment process, meaning less business time was required for assessment.
• The application-to-hire ratio was cut by half, from 32:1 to 16:1.
• There was a 55% reduction in first-year attrition.
• There was a 58% reduction in recruitment cost, saving £24M.